Beneath the Soil Read Free

only a few steps, the view opened out. The farm was sited just under the brow of the hill. Just low enough to be sheltered from the northerly winds, Suzie reflected. The farmhouse and its barns made an L-shape around the yard, with an old covered well in one corner. The cob walls, on their stone base, had been whitewashed, but here and there the raw red earth showed through on the barn. The house was in rather better trim, but the window frames had not been painted for years. The black paint was peeling. Moss grew thick on the battered thatch.
    â€˜There’s no sign of life,’ Suzie said.
    No chickens scratched in the yard. There was no contented moan of cows. No one was at work out of doors.
    Her words came back to her with an ominous echo she had not intended.
    â€˜Oh, come on, then!’ Millie stalked up to the front door, elegantly casual in her jeans and ankle boots. She rapped the heavy knocker.
    There was a moment’s silence. Then a dog barked frantically. Simultaneously, a door Suzie had not noticed opened at the end of the long building. A woman in a floral wrap-around apron came out, overtaken by a noisy black-and-white collie. She was smaller than Millie. Her pale hair straggled around her shoulders in limp curls, a sad contrast to Millie’s white-blonde haircut, yet beneath the apron, her silk shirt and linen skirt looked unexpectedly stylish for this rural setting. Her thin face looked scared.
    â€˜Yes?’ Her greyish eyes were round with questions.
    Suzie felt a sudden desire to protect and comfort her. She stepped forward impulsively. The collie ran forward, barking.
    â€˜Mrs Caseley? We met your husband back in the wood.’ She could not help but see how the woman started back. ‘He said it was all right for us to come on up here and ask you where my great-great-grandparents might have lived in the 1850s. It was in the census that Richard Day was a labourer on the farm here. The address was “Cottage, Saddlers Wood”.’
    She felt the incongruity of what she was asking. It must seem so remote, so trivial, to whatever this frightened woman in front of her was undergoing. Suzie could not help but think, as she knew all the family must be thinking, of that distraught man who had burst out of the trees clutching a recently fired shotgun in his hand.
    The collie quietened under Millie’s stroking hand.
    Mrs Caseley struggled to get control of herself. She even managed a pale smile.
    â€˜You’d better come in, then.’
    Suzie met Nick’s eyes questioningly.
    â€˜If that’s all right? We don’t want to be a nuisance if it’s a bad time.’
    But Mrs Caseley had turned her back and was walking towards the half-open door. The Fewings looked at each other and followed.
    The kitchen was darker than Suzie had expected. A black Rayburn took up most of one wall. The central table and work surfaces were cluttered with unwashed crockery and pans. Mrs Caseley pushed back her hair from her eyes with a weary hand.
    â€˜You’ll have to excuse it. I’m behind with things today.’
    Why? Suzie wondered.
    â€˜Not at all,’ she said hastily. ‘We should have rung up to ask if we could come. It wasn’t fair to spring ourselves upon you like this.’
    Two steps led up into a living room. Suzie had expected to find it stuffed with old furniture, handed down through the generations. But it was sparsely furnished, and what there was looked cheap and modern. With a flash of insight, she wondered how much of the older stuff might have been sold off to pay bills. Probably what used to be here would have acquired antique status, snapped up to furnish the cottages and converted barns that people with higher incomes bought as second homes.
    A sadness came over her as she looked around her. A way of life was dying. The county where her own ancestors had lived and worked for so long was being taken over by incomers, who thought of it only